Anth 103 Notes 10 27 12 2 Google Docs Essay

Anth 103 Notes 10/27/14 Screening – “AAA on Race” ● First laborers – European indentured servants ● When the first African slaves were brought over, status was defined by wealth and religion. With the development of the slave trade over time, however, a new social structure emerged based primarily on skin color. English at the top, and
Africans/Indians on the bottom. ● “All men are created equal” in the Constitution was written by a slave owner…
○ Africans and Indians were viewed as less than human, unworthy of basic rights.
■ Anyone not white was viewed as “biologically inferior”
■ This led to legalized segregation, concentration camps for the
Japanese, etc. ● Thankfully, today, we know that all humans share a common ancestry; new patterns and thoughts about race are emerging.
○ However, the legacy of race continues to affect us in a variety of ways. Gaps in wealth, housing, education, employment…all privileges people have been granted or denied because of their skin color. Human Biological Diversity and the Race Concept
● Racial classification – an attempt to assign humans to discrete categories based on ancestry and appearance
● Race, in the west, is taken for granted in terms of phenotypic differences AAA Statement on “Race”
● According to the AAA, in the U.S., both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species.
● However, evidence from genetics indicates that most (94%) of physical variation lies within a racial population. Within, for example, white persons; there is a 94% racial differentiation. ● This means that there is a greater variation within racial groups than between them
● Whenever different groups have come into contact, they inbreed. What historical research has shown that the very idea of race has carried more meanings than typical phenotypical differences; it often expresses hierarchies.
● Race was invented in the 18th century to classify populations brought to the Americas

Aristotle – “Great Chain of Being”
● Aristotle, in 800 B.C., says that some people are naturally slaves and others are naturally masters – from his book “Politics”
● “There is no difficulty in this question…for that some should rule and others should be ruled is necessary; some are marked for subjection.”
● Talks about barbarians, primitives, and the like. Suggests that there should be no distinction between women and slaves
● This idea permeates to questions of culture today; flows through the idea of the “great chain of being”, that there are some dominant organisms on the planet de la Casas vs. Sepulveda
● Debate in the catholic church over what to do with the indigenous populations of the
Americas
● When Columbus discovered the New World, he reported that the inhabitants, although intelligent, had no weapons; therefore, they could be easily conquered and enslaved.
The labor was needed to search for gold
● Arguing that the indigenous people of the Americas are human and that they can be saved (de la Casas). Sepulveda believes that they cannot be saved Evolutionary Anthropology
● 18th and 19th centuries. What really drives the idea of race/racism is the idea of progress. In a social universe that saw massive growth, the history of a common life began to be understood as step­by­step stages, and that some populations on the globe were living in the past (suggested by the United States and Europe)
● From the reading, life was looked at through a series of stages, from very primitive to very complex. Taking hold the idea that some populations on the globe are of “the living past,” in a previous stage in development.
● Idea still persists today and links up with the idea of slavery, which was increasingly being rationalized in recourse the idea of this “lesser humanity” of certain cultures
● Are they descendants of Adam and Eve or not?
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